A nightmarish scenario almost went from bad to worse at Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County, Md., but for the quick action of school resource officer Deputy 1st Class Blaine Gaskill, armed and stationed inside. Gaskill pursued and fatally wounded a student who had shot and injured two of his schoolmates before he could do any more harm.
According to NBC Washington, Austin Wyatt Rollins, 17, brought a semi-automatic handgun into the high school shortly before 8 a.m. on Tuesday and opened fire in the hallway, wounding a 16-year-old female and a 14-year-old male student. Rollins then shot at Gaskill before he fired a round at Rollins, fatally wounding him.
The 16-year-old female student was transferred to the intensive care unit at the University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center, where she’s currently faced with life-threatening injuries. Meanwhile, the 14-year-old male student is said to be in good condition.
While the motive is not yet clear, St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron indicated there may have been a prior relationship between the shooter and the 16-year-old female student.
The whole situation is shocking and traumatizing for any student, teacher, and parent connected to the school. Great Mills is lucky to not have a higher amount of casualties. While it’s saddening that two students were harmed — one of which is fighting for her life — and that the shooter was killed as a result of his actions, having a trained resource officer like Blaine Gaskill contain the threat almost immediately after it started protected hundreds of lives at the school. Gaskill is a hero.
At this point, it’s difficult to say if the shooting was isolated or the start of a Parkland-style shooting — one which involves an indiscriminate amount of carnage and brutality. But what we can say with utmost certainty is that having trained officers stationed at each school throughout the country who are ready and willing to put themselves in the line of fire to protect students and teachers may be the only way we can actually reduce gun violence at schools.
If more suburban and rural schools adapt the security models of urban schools, which include resource officers and metal detectors at every entrance, then we can abandon the proposal to have armed teachers — many of whom are averse to the idea — in schools.
As the March For Our Lives approaches — which only addresses one aspect of reducing gun violence: gun bans — one school resource officer in rural Maryland is showing us how you stop a school shooter: by being a good guy with a gun.
